Julie Andreyev: Greenroom

Greenroom is an interactive new media installation by Canadian artist Julie Andreyev. Visitors are invited to enter the TechLab and observe, play, relax, and create within this virtual park. Greenroom uses a variety of technologies: surveillance cameras, sensors, digital video, surround sound, data projectors, computers, software, and the Internet. Combined, they offer visitors the opportunity to experience telepresence—the state of being in one location while appearing in real time, in another.

Greenroom will exist in two locations, here and during pass-thru, at the Emily Carr Institute Media Gallery (Granville Island). These sites, called “parcs” will be almost identical, both equipped with a variety of mock-park props and interactive video. In Surrey, the image projected on the back wall is a real-time video of the “natural” environment outside (Bear Creek Park). On the entrance window screen is an image of the interior of the TechLab, mirroring the image on the back wall. When you enter and explore the “parc,” your movement could trigger sensors. You may become part of the artwork, with your image projected on the window—appearing as though you were in the park. Your movement may also activate sound or another image to appear on the back wall. In Greenroom’s second phase (pass-thru), scenes from Surrey may be exchanged with images, via the Internet, from Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver.

Idealists imagined that the Internet could become a kind of agora—a forum for easy and equal communication—a site for community. With the advent of interactive “chat” technology, and real-time Internet broadcasting using “web cams,” this became technically possible with moving image and sound. An expectation has also persisted that technology will provide positive solutions for any challenge in our lives. For the most hopeful, it promises a potential utopia—a kind of digital Eden—wherein all problems are addressed. The Greenroom suggests an engagement with both of these ideas, but inserts a parodied reality between the real and virtual park/parcs. Its full-body interactive technology and video chat capabilities invites the visitor to experience the latest form of online culture. Like its namesake from theatre, the space where performers prepare before going on stage, Greenroom offers visitors a site to “be themselves” before they are sent “on stage” through the portal.

Read the exhibition brochure

About the Artist

Julie Andreyev is an artist, vegan, researcher, and educator. Andreyev’s art practice, called Animal Lover, examines animal agency and creativity using modes of interspecies collaboration and relational ontologies. The projects take the form of new media performance, video and sound installation, and relational aesthetics. The Animal Lover projects have been shown across Canada, USA, Europe, and Asia, and are supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Andreyev is Artistic Director of a biannual symposium/exhibition called Interactive Futures. She is co-founder of the art group Vegan Congress.

Image credit: Visitor interacting with Julie Andreyev's Greenroom in Surrey Art Gallery's TechLab.